The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

December 17, 2014

Essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot’s
essay on tradition and the individual is perhaps one of the most important
essays of the period. It reiterates, or explores in a slightly different
context, the very issues that Pound and William’s were debating in their
letters and poetic writings. But Eliot’s argument for the pure aesthetic and
authorial “surrender” to the work also served as an important source for the
later New Critics that grew out of the poetically conservative Fugitive
movement, finding its ultimate expression in a poet such as Robert Lowell. For
William Carlos Williams, on the other hand, Eliot’s essay represented a
statement in opposition to many of his ideas, and would push his USA-based
poetics further away from the continental influences of both Eliot and Pound.

T.
S. Eliot

Tradition and
the Individual Talent

I

In
English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its
name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a
tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of
So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the
word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely
approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing
archeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English
ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of
archeology.

Certainly
the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead
writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own
critical tum of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and
limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We
know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has
appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we
only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are “more
critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact,
as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might
remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we
should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read
a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their
work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is
our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work
in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work
we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man.
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can
be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this
prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual
parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert
their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period
of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet
if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways
of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its
successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such
simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition.
Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and
if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first
place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone
who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely
with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the
literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of
his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the
temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a
writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely
conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No
poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance,
his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and
artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and
comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of

In
a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the
standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be
as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the
canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are
measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really
to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of
art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in;
but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test, it is true, which can only be
slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of
conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it
appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it
is one and not the other.

To
proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the
past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can
he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form
himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the
second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and
highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main
current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished
reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never
improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be
aware that the mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he
learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind
which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en
route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock
drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement
perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist,
any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the
psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end
based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference
between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness
of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself
cannot show.

Some
one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than
they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I
am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the
metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous
amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the
lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning
deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing
that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary
receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to
whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the
still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more
tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from
Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be
insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the
past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his
career.

What
happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something
which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There
remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the
sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to
approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider,
as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely
filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur
dioxide.

II

Honest
criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the
poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the
susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets
in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of
poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. In the last article I
tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by
other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all
the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal
theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an
analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one
not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being necessarily more
interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely
perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to
enter into new combinations.

The
analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed
in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This
combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly
formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is
apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of
the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon
the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which
creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions
which are its material.

The
experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the
transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a
work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind
from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be
a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in
particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final
result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion
whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto
Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the
effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable
complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to
an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but
which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper
combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a
receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images,
which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new
compound are present together.

If
you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how
great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical
criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it is not the “greatness,” the
intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic
process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that
counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the
intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in
the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense,
furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct
dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of
transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives
an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes
from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion
of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself.
But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the
combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that
which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of
elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing
particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly,
perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation,
served to bring together.

The
point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is,
that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium,
which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences
which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those
which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the
man, the personality.

I
will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh
attention in the light-or darkness-of these observations:

And
now methinks I could e’en chide myself

For
doating on her beauty, though her death

Shall
be revenged after no common action.

Does
the silkworm expend her yellow labours

For
thee? For thee does she undo herself?

Are
lordships sold to maintain ladyships

For
the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

Why
does yon fellow falsify highways,

And
put his life between the judge’s lips,

To
refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

To
beat their valours for her? ...

In
this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a
combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction
toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is
contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is
in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation
alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion,
provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the
fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by
no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art
emotion.

It
is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in
his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular
emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a
very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who
have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of
eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in
this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business
of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in
working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his
turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that
“emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither
emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It
is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very
great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not
seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen
consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and
they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a
passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and
deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be
conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to
make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This
essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine
itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible
person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is
a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry,
good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere
emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate
technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of significant
emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the
poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And
he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not
merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious,
not of what is dead, but of what is already living.